There will be a multitude of different travel data used within our application. When a user accepts an event invitation they will be offered the option to choose their desired method of travel. This can be walking, bus, train, taxi, aeroplane. Koh.Tu.Me will provide suggestions for these different types of travel, complete with the time taken to use this method, prices, locations (e.g bus stops), and people in a close vicinity they can share travel with. In addition to this Koh.Tu.Me will also be using weather data to provide the weather forecast element of the application.

Koh.Tu.Me will be looking to use Open Data as much as possible because this is data that is freely available for anybody to use under an Open Government License [1]. This post will be looking at the different types of travel data we need to use. As Koh.Tu.Me is being created in Southampton by Southampton University Students then potentially a Southampton prototype could be created first to test out the application. This post will be looking at travel data specifically in Southampton, and also for the rest of the UK. Following this, this post will then touch on travel difficulties in different countries, and weather forecast information.

Busses
There are a number of different bus companies in Southampton. UniLink runs the connecting services between all of the University Campus’s and Halls of Residences’s, as well as to both Train Stations and the Airport. BlueStar operates other bus services outside the University to provide services between Southampton, Eastleigh, Winchester, Romsey and Waterside areas of Hampshire.

Southampton Data
Southampton University has made much of it’s data ‘open’ including it’s bus information. The following datasets could be utilised by our application to freely access bus timetable information.

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/bus-info– this is the open linked data set of all of the latest bus information, including bus routes, bus stops, geographical positioning, and links to bus times.

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/transport-linkset – this is the open linked data set of bus and train information into the government “Naptan” scheme. Naptan is a system that can uniquely identify all access points to public transport.

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/transport-locations – this is the open linked data set of the location of bus stops relative to campuses.

UK Data
http://travelinedata.org.uk/nextbuses.htm – this is real time bus information that can be accessed via an API.

Clearly there is a lot of Open Data bus information that could be used within our application. This would mean that this set of data could be obtained and used for free under the Open Government License. An initial version of our social networking application could look to use one service such as NextBusses, and as new iterations get created it could expand to use different bus sets for different cities that have them available such as Southampton.

Trains:
There are also excellent train connections in Southampton by South West Trains, with two train stations: Southampton Central and Southampton Airport Parkway. South West Trains offers the option of group travel on certain journeys, enabling people to save money by travelling together in a group.There are several open data feeds that contain rail information:

Southampton Data
There is less Southampton specific data regarding trains, however there is still one dataset:

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/transport-linkset provides bus and train information for Southampton.

UK Data
http://www.networkrail.co.uk/data-feeds/ and http://www.opentraintimes.com/ both provide real time train information.

These datasets would definitely provide a large amount of train based data for use within Koh.Tu.Me. Combining this with the bus information would facilitate journeys with multiple types of travel within them.

Taxis:
There are a number of different taxi companies in Southampton, notably Radio Taxis which is widely advertised around Southampton. 

Southampton Data
There is no specific Southampton Open Data for taxi information. There are certain taxi companies such as Radio Taxis (mentioned above) that promote themselves to Southampton University during Freshers Fayre’s and other events. They would be the companies to approach to ask if they would pay to be promoted within our application, or even if they would pay us a small finders fee for any bookings made through Koh.Tu.Me.

UK Data
http://www.owenboswarva.com/opendata/Taxi_and_Private_Hire_Companies.xls – provides a list of taxi and private hire companies within the UK. Unfortunately despite providing Company name and address information they don’t provide phone numbers. Therefore in order to make use of this facility, Koh.Tu.Me could either provide taxi suggestions for the user to go and look up, or do an in-app google search for these taxi companies to provide phone numbers.

Aeroplanes & Ferry
Southampton has an airport and therefore that might be the natural choice to fly from if there were the right flights available. Additionally it also has a Ferry Port down at the docks.

Southampton Data
There is no specific Southampton Airport or Ferry Data although again it might be possible to liase with the airport/ferry port to make their data available to our application.

UK Data
http://openflights.org/data.html – this is an open data set of airports, airlines and flights all around the world. This would allow Koh.Tu.Me to provide information about how to fly to another country to our users. This could of course be used for Southampton flight data.

http://www.traveline.info/tnds.html – this is an open data set of public timetables for various methods of transport including ferries. This equally could also be used for Southampton ferry data.

Walking
As with most cities, the cheapest easiest way to get to and from certain locations is simply to walk. Southampton has certain footpaths that provide shortcuts around the city, and also has safer places to walk through such as the University Campus.

Southampton Data
http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/southampton-postcodes – this is a dataset of the Southampton Postcodes which also contains lat/long information that could be used to identify places within close proximity to each other.

UK Data
http://www.openstreetmap.org/ – this is an open data set of map information which would enable our application to not only look up start and end locations and identify their proximity, but also to potentially provide directions between them.

Conclusions
There is a lot of Open Data available for all of the different travel elements of these locations. This is fantastic news for Koh.Tu.Me as it means not only is there a wealth of data available to use to build up our application, but also this data can be used for free.

Travel issues in different parts of the world:
Each country has different transportation systems that differ due to culture aspects, finance etc. In the Arab Gulf States (Someah is from there) there is a shortage of public transport in most regions, especially small towns. The majority of people use private cars to travel short distance, and aeroplanes to travel long distance. Once Koh.Tu.Me was expanded into an international application it could adopt different travel suggestions and use different data sets depending on the Country the user is in, (or indeed going to).

Weather Forecast Information
OpenWeatherMap is an example of open weather data. This site provides free open data about weather, along with APIs for developers to use within their applications. It receives its data from broadcasts and forecast from more than 40,000 weather stations. It has a variety of information such as week forecasts that would enable users to plan ahead for their events with relevant weather information.

References

[1] http://data.gov.uk/blog/new-open-government-license